| As his letters reveal, J. R. R. Tolkien clearly intended to open a way for others to follow after him in the cultivation and literary creation of Other-worlds, not only as a refreshment to the soul, but as something of a natural mode and right of inheritance for each of us as the creative offspring of a Maker.;This hermeneutic exegesis of Tolkien's creative process reveals that he and his works not only hold up a literary mirror to the wisdom and praxis of depth and archetypal psychology but also exemplify the consciousness of a larger "magical" and imaginative tradition that calls for an even more aesthetic and imaginal psychology. This venerable lineage was named the "tradition of the magus" by fifteenth-century neoplatonic artist-scholar Marsilio Ficino. Its ancient principles served to ignite the Florentine Renaissance. Those of the magus lineage embrace the hermeneutic perspective innate to the Heart, which is both a participatory and a transformative threshold. This initiatory path is mythically sponsored by the friendliest god, Hermes. It is the intent of this study to make more visible this tradition and to identify certain forces that harm or censor it.;A further purpose of this theoretical study includes making available Tolkien's thoughts on his literary process, which impart to us a recovery of the threshold of the Heart from which a sense of kinship with all life and creative insight springs. This threshold is an imaginal doorway through which the "middle realm," or what Henry Corbin has called the mundus imaginalis, can be experienced. From this place, the creative process becomes co-creation within the parameters established by the biosphere and the life around us.;Tolkien reminds us of the divinity within, calling us to a deeper personal level of truth and reality. Such a lens allows us to perceive beyond our everyday world to the powers, images, figures, creatures, and stories of faerie and the middle realm which deeply inform our lives. With this perception Tolkien reminds us that we might participate in the ongoing unfolding of the epiphanic living cosmos. |
